If this is your first summit and this nutritional info is new to you and you feel overwhelmed start at the beginning and take baby steps and start with the basics: switch to eating a real whole foods diet and dump the junk/processed food, eat to control blood sugar get off the sugar and get off the gluten and caffeine.

You can come back to the advanced topics like oxytocin and fluroquinoline toxicty and Lyme disease and heavy metals and Ehlers Danlos syndrome (and all the rest) later.

Here is what we know from the research: disorder of connective tissue, premature osteoarthritis, intestinal dysmotility, and laxity in other tissues causing hernias or uterine or rectal prolapse, chronic pain some with serious disability

Here is the feedback I received from my blog reader: much higher than expected incidences of anxiety, depression, chronic pain which is often labelled as fibromyalgia, gastrointestinal problems, pyroluria, POTS (Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome) and MCAS (Mast Cell Activation Syndrome), leaky gut, less than ideal responses to nutrient therapies, many on cocktails of medications for pain, sleep, anxiety, depression, reflux, IBS, menstrual disorders etc. [I appreciate her for posing the question]

There are a number of papers published in 2014 and 2015 linking EDS / Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome with psychiatric disorders, in one Swedish paper anxiety was as high as 74.8%. In another paper they found preliminary connections with depression, ADHD, autism spectrum disorders, and OCD.

I have had many people with pyroluria confirm the connection and a number who get on the pyroluria protocol see their symptoms improve. One person found a connection to Thin Basement Membrane Disease (an inherited collagen/connective tissue disorder diagnosed via kidney biopsy) and pyroluria and saw an improvement in both on the pyroluria protocol.

I agree completely, both that people with EDS should never be given fluoroquinolones (check this out ), and that fluoroquinolones can also exacerbate and cause EDS symptoms (and maybe EDS itself). Fluoroquinolones definitely cause connective tissue problems. They even have a black box warning on them noting the damage they can do to tendons. In addition to tendons, they can also damage cartilage, muscles, and collagen. I’m not sure whether the FQs trigger symptoms of EDS, or if they trigger epigenetic changes that lead to EDS. There are an unfortunately large number of people who have EDS symptoms post-exposure to these drugs.

I haven’t had a chance to look into everything they recommend but I’ve been super impressed with what I’ve seen on this online forum.

Let us know if this resonates with you and if you have you been diagnosed with joint hypermobility or Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome? If you have pyroluria to let us know if the pyroluria protocol of zinc, vitamin B6, evening primrose oil and a good copper-free multi has helped?

It was very helpful to hear of Tricia and her family’s journey with lyme, anxiety, pylouria, GABA, etc. I am hoping that other parents will try “natural” remedies first for anxiety, panic, etc. I was put on antidepressants in my early teens and thus began a life long battle of trying to get my life back.

My parents didn’t know the repercussions of the medications I was on. I went from being an A student to being completely zoned out for a while in school, along with other problems from the prescription medications. Then came the thoughts of suicide and more. I had no idea what was going on with me.

Years later, a psychiatrist who seemed more open to natural remedies and who couldn’t find a medication that could help me or keep me from completely losing it, had an “enlightened moment” and when he went back over my history realized the “issues” I was having was most likely related to my hormones. I would indeed find out later that this was the case and that it had to do a lot with what we were eating growing up. My hormones were a mess as a young teenager and what we were eating a home was not at all healthy for us and filled with hormones, antibiotics, etc.

I want to impress on people that these prescription medications will ALWAYS do more damage than good. And my heart breaks when I hear of the young people around me being put on these medications. I just recently learned ECT (shock treatment) is now being used on the young.

Some time back, I cannot remember, I learned of you, Trudy, and your work. Even though I knew some of what you taught, I was still afraid to completely let go of the meds. It took some time, a great deal of struggle, patience and trust, but I eventually made the switch to a WAY MORE healthier diet, L-tryptophan, GABA calm and GABA, and have slowly begun to reclaim my life.

If you are not already registered for the Anxiety Summit you can get live access to the speakers of the day here: www.theAnxietySummit.com

Missed this interview or can’t listen live? Or want this and the other great interviews for your learning library? Purchase the MP3s or MP3s + transcripts and listen when it suits you.

GABA: Blood brain barrier controversy, concerns, best forms and how to do a trial for eliminating anxiety

Dispelling the blood brain barrier and the leaky brain myths

The newest research on GABA effectiveness

The best forms of GABA and why I have concerns about phenibut

Results from clients and feedback from practitioners using GABA

How to do a trial for the best results in eliminating anxiety

Here are some snippets from my presentation:

Worry and anxiety can be a result of low GABA and also low serotonin, so you may check off anxiety in both sections. Low GABA tends to result in a more physical anxiety, while low serotonin tends to result in more anxiety in the head and ruminating thoughts etc

With low GABA you have physical anxiety

Anxiety and feeling overwhelmed or stressed

Feeling worried or fearful

Panic attacks

Unable to relax or loosen up

Stiff or tense muscles

Feeling stressed and burned-out

Craving carbs, alcohol, or drugs for relaxation and calming

The targeted use of individual amino acid supplements like GABA will balance brain chemistry to alleviate anxiety, fear, worry, panic attacks, and feeling stressed or overwhelmed. They can also be helpful in addressing other problems that contribute to or exacerbate anxiety, such as sugar cravings and addictions. In addition, they can help with depression and insomnia, which often co-occur with anxiety.

the main precaution with GABA is low blood pressure but I have yet to see it as an issue, liver/kidney issues – watch, GABA has not been studied in pregnancy or breastfeeding

Many individuals tapering from benzodiazepines find using GABA and other nutrients help the taper while others can’t tolerate GABA and other supplements. If you’re new to the ill-effects of benzos do watch this webinar I did for Hawthorn University last year: Say NO to Benzos

The blood brain barrier controversy and the fact that so many people say GABA only works if you have a leaky brain

Does a GABA supplement have to cross the blood brain barrier to be effective? A nutrition seminar I have been to, said it does not and GABA supplements are ineffective

Zonulin is a tight junction modulator that is released by the small intestine mucosa upon gluten stimulation. Interestingly the zonulin receptor, identified as the precursor for haptoglobin-2, has been found in the human brain. Overexpression of zonulin (aka haptoglobin-2) could be involved in the blood brain barrier disruption similarly to the role that zonulin plays in increasing intestinal permeability.

In the literature, there are controversial findings about GABA entering the brain through the blood brain barrier (BBB). The BBB is a tightly sealed layer of cerebral endothelial cells that form continuous tight junctions and prevent most solutes from entering the brain on the basis of size, charge, and lipid solubility. However … recent studies have demonstrated that the BBB is much more dynamic than assumed in the past, and some passage of solutes can occur by transcytosis, carrier-mediated transport, or simple diffusion of hydrophobic substances.

GABA and its receptors are found in a wide range of peripheral tissues, including parts of the peripheral nervous system, endocrine, and non-neural tissues such as smooth muscle and the female reproductive system

There is some evidence in favor of a calming effect of GABA food supplements, but most of this evidence was reported by researchers with a potential conflict of interest. We suggest that any veridical effects of GABA food supplements on brain and cognition might be exerted through BBB passage or, more indirectly, via an effect on the enteric nervous system. We conclude that the mechanism of action of GABA food supplements is far from clear, and that further work is needed to establish the behavioral effects of GABA.

[GABA] is definitely something I use. I am not a biochemist, so I actually don’t really know whether it crosses the blood/brain barrier, nor do I care actually. The first question should be, is it harmful? Are any of these things going to cause harm? And the answer with all the amino acids are no, they’re not going to cause harm, especially when compared to psychiatric medicines. The second question is, does it work? Is it helpful for our patients that we see in our practice?

I have found GABA to be invariably helpful and I don’t really know exactly how GABA works but I know it to be very, very safe and, to me, that is fundamentally important. It’s not associated with any withdrawal, with any tolerance, with any habituation, so people can try it without a lot of concern.

And it seems fitting to end with a quote from my mentor Julia Ross

On a scale of zero to ten, zero is not an unrealistic goal when it comes to anxiety. It’s really the human potential and GABA gives us access to it.

Dee likes the instant calm from a product that contains 500mg GABA and 200mg Theanine:

I have taken Xanax in the past for panic attacks. My functional medicine doctor suggested this product as I wanted a natural product. I was amazed how it works just like the Xanax did – instant calm feeling within 10 mins of taking 2 capsules. I use them as needed when I am having heightened stress and anxiety.

After my first panic attack I thankfully found Julia Ross’s work. I began taking 250 mg GABA every night. That really helped! Now a few years later I don’t need it every day, and I take a half pill during my cycle anxiety – more like uneasiness and over worried now, just as needed. I then heard you speak Trudy and share more info, bought your book, and put into place supportive lifestyle changes, and I have my life back. GABA is a great supplement for some of us!

Gina chewed two 100mg pharma GABA tablets and said this:

It changed my life in minutes! Take it every day now. No more hopelessness!

Do the amino acid questionnaire, review the precautions and do a GABA trial and let us know how it worked for you? If you’re a practitioner I’d love feedback too.

I’d also love to hear if you notice any difference opening a capsule or using something like GABA Calm instead of swallowing a capsule.

Here’s to hope and calm!

If you are not already registered for the Anxiety Summit you can get live access to the speakers of the day here: www.theAnxietySummit.com

Missed this interview or can’t listen live? Or want this and the other great interviews for your learning library? Purchase the MP3s or MP3s + transcripts and listen when it suits you.

Used GABA Calm sublinguals with good results and the Lyme pyroluria connection

Tricia shares this about her daughter’s Lyme anxiety:

When she was about seven my husband and I started noticing that she was washing her hands a lot, to the point where her hands would be just so raw and they would bleed a little bit. And we noticed just some repetitive things that she was doing. She started having like facial tics and motor tics and just really certain things would just kind of scare her more than usual. I kept taking her to the pediatrician and everything and then we started noticing more symptoms. She just began having anxiety, and it started out just kind of like little spurts here and there, but it became so overwhelming and so controlling over her life that she did not want to leave the house and she did not want me to leave her. Part of her anxiety was that something was going to happen to me. So she would just try to protect me with everything in her to keep me home with her or that I would take her with me everywhere I went. I could not leave her for a second. And if I did you could just tell she was so afraid and it was so heartbreaking, but it was so exhausting as a mom because it was 24 hours a day, it was not wanting to go to sleep at night; waking up in the middle of the night. If she read something for school it would set her off. If she saw something on TV that would set her off. And it just became a life consuming problem. And we were desperate, just desperate for answers.

when your child is in this full-blown panic attack they’re not going to swallow a pill so the sublingual was great because I would put it in her mouth under her tongue and just tell her to suck on it. And you could just tell it would start to work and start to calm her down and really help her out.

They would take the edge off of her anxiety; they would help her to go back to sleep at night. And they helped me because I started taking GABA when I was so stressed out trying to interact with her and trying to help her.

And it’s nice to be able to just carry it in my purse if I need to, if anybody needs one

According to Dr. Klinghart, pyroluria needs to be addressed in order for the Lyme treatment to be successful. Here is the pyroluria questionnaire

What happened in around 2009, although the link between diet and mental health was rarely investigated prior to that time, a researcher from Deacon University named Dr. Felice Jacka came on the scene and she did her dissertation exploring dietary patterns. So not only taking those dietary triggers, which were just really specific foods, but also seeing what were people eating as overall dietary patterns that was making a difference? And when she did that research she kind of noted two different diets emerging. And that’s the traditional diet with high intakes of grass fed meats, fish, vegetables and fruit and then our all too familiar SAD diet, the American standard diet. And what she found was that there were very, very different outcomes, mental health wise, for people who were eating the traditional versus the processed diet. And in fact her dissertation elucidated that if you were eating higher amounts of processed food or a standard American diet you had a 50 percent greater incidence of depression and anxiety. So that was really an important finding for my thesis.

“In our study, out of every single dietary food grouping that I looked at including vegetables, fruits, salads, beans, etc the strongest correlate of mental health was red meat intake,” grass-fed red meat of course.

Grass fed red meat is different in two main ways. And that’s because it has higher and a different fatty acid profile, especially omega-3 fatty acid. There seems to be more, I think three to five times more than conventional raised beef. And that’s important because omega-3 are known to be very therapeutic for mental health and a number of other health issues. So as many of those omega-3’s as we can get is a good thing. But what it also does is there’s omega-3 fatty acid and there’s omega-6 fatty acid and it improves the ratio. It has kind of a perfect ratio. Our ancestors had a ratio between these two fatty acid’s of about one to one and the common American today has a ratio of about 20 to one, which they hypothesize, and a lot of research suggest, leads to inflammation in the body, which is the root of basically all degenerative diseases. So grass fed beef has a ratio of about 1.5 to one, which is almost perfect compared to one to 7.5 in conventionally raised beef. So that’s just a huge difference.

And then there’s also something called CLA, which is another fatty acid known to have cancer fighting properties. One study showed that the women who ate the most CLA had a lower risk of breast cancer. And it’s also known to optimize the deposition of fat in the body so that’s really important. But the other major benefit of grass fed beef is its antioxidant profile. There’s higher levels of glutathione, which is our bodies master antioxidant. There’s I think seven times more vitamin A or beta-carotene, the precursors to vitamin A. And I think three times more vitamin E. There’s also higher levels of B vitamins, which are so critical for mental health, and minerals, especially zinc and iron and magnesium, which are also really, really important for mental health. But the other side of the coin is, like Trudy said, what we’re not getting that conventionally raised beef has to offer and that is the hormones, the antibiotics and the pesticides, which just wreak havoc on our health. And toxins are stored in fat as well, which is a really, really important thing to remember. So when you’re eating the fat of a conventionally raised animal that fat is actually storing up all of those toxins and then you’re getting a healthy dose in every bite. So basically grass fed beef is allowing us to only put into our body what’s going to allow us to thrive and none of what won’t, which is why I’m so passionate about it.

Copper and estrogen are related and I’ve seen probably 400 cases of postpartum depression. Virtually all of them have a copper overload. These are people who might have been on SSRI antidepressants and with nothing really happening not making them better or worse. But if we are able to simply normalize their copper most of them become completely okay and you can throw away their medications. They’re the easiest people to help.

Well with respect to the females if a person has an anxiety disorder or a depression disorder and we find out that the onset was at puberty we kind of expect that the lab results are going to show this is a copper problem because at hormonal events copper levels tend to go awry if you’re not able to regulate your copper. So it can happen at puberty. It can happen at childbirth. And it can happen at menopause. During the nine months of a pregnancy a women’s copper level more than doubles. And this is necessary for that growing fetus. It’s necessary for something called angiogenesis to promote the rapid development of blood vessels that that little growing baby needs. And at the end of a pregnancy a woman’s copper level is usually more than double what it normally is. A woman normally would be around 100 micrograms per deciliter in her blood. Maybe it would be 220 at the end of a pregnancy.

Well right after the baby’s born that copper level is supposed to start heading right back down to normal. Well people with postpartum depression don’t have that ability and this can completely disrupt two of the major neurotransmitters and misery sometimes for the rest of their lives. But the way we would bring it down, you have to do it carefully because they’re already suffering from too much copper levels in their brain and in their bloodstream so we have to remove the copper gently and gradually. And one way to do that is to give them small doses of zinc initially and then just gradually build up the doses to the full dose it takes to normalize their zinc which will then automatically get the natural metallothionein system working. And it takes about six to eight weeks usually. But it can be done and it can be done without any discomfort for the patient if it’s done slowly.

I enjoyed hearing how Dr. Walsh got to work with one of the great pioneers in orthomolecular mental health, Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, author of Nutrition and Mental Illness: An Orthomolecular Approach to Balancing Body Chemistry, and creator of the first pyroluria questionnaire. I based my pyroluria questionnaire off this one. Dr. Walsh has done the same thing.

If a person had undermethylated depression they have low serotonin activity. If you gave these people methylfolate their methylation would improve and the patient would get worse.

So basically I agree completely with Dr. Lynch on the best way to improve methylation and all I’m saying is that for some people, people who have problems of neurotransmission of serotonin you can’t give them folates because they’ll get worse. So that’s an exception to the general rule.

So it is these people who are the undermethylators (and using the original terminology, those with high histamine or histadelia) that do worse on folate.

Dr. Walsh agreed that the terminology undermethylation and overmethyation is confusing.

In part 1 we start by discussing the history, the controversy in 1990 over contaminated L-tryptophan, the impurities that lead to the EMS outbreak and why Lidtke has “been fanatical about purity and safety” since then:

the main [impurity] was EBT [1,1′-ethylidene-bis-L-tryptophan] and that was the one that they suspected was the most heavily implicated. They never could identify exactly which ones were toxic or in combination. It could be like numbers one, two and five in combination were deadly or two and six in combination more deadly or maybe just six alone was deadly. They never were able to determine that because they never found an animal model to use in research because when they would feed the rats or any other kind of animal, lab animal they had samples of this known toxic tryptophan, none of them responded the way humans do. They have a very different gut flora and metabolism and they never responded the same so they weren’t about to use humans in any of these clinical trials so they never really could tell which of those six were the worst, but they strongly suspected that EBT was the worst

Ron covers how glyphosate/Roundup is contributing to low serotonin levels:

…the food crops absorb the chemical, they still soak it up and then they’re sent to market and you buy them and you cook them and you eat then and then you soak it up. Well, you don’t produce tryptophan or phenylalanine, but your gut bacteria to do. And preferentially the beneficial gut bacteria tend to be killed by the glyphosates. So when that happens the pathogenic bacteria tend to dominate. And then when that happens when they grow kind of out of control then even more tryptophan is used up by the macrophages, which then attack the pathogens.

If you’d like to read more about this we covered this is much more detail in these interviews:

And we discuss the Tryptophan Complete product, the ingredients and rationale for including P5P, lysine, curcumin, folic acid and niacinamide. This is my feedback on the product:

the Tryptophan Complete is one that I’m not as familiar with as the 500 milligram Tryptophan. I’ve been using the 500 milligram with my clients for over ten years. The Tryptophan Complete is just a new one that’s sort of come on my radar and I started looking into it and I actually posted something on Facebook a few months ago and then did a blog post to get feedback from people [see below]. And I’ve had some promising feedback. I’ve had one person say “I’ve used the Tryptophan Complete and liked it a lot better than the 500 milligrams. It gave me a much deeper state of relaxation and a way more solid sleep.” She used that, got benefits then tried the 500 and now has decided to go back to the Complete. So she feels that the addition of the other ingredients really helped for her body chemistry. I did have someone else say that she can’t do P5P at all. It makes her agitated. So for people who have individual reactions to any of the ingredients then you would go with the 500 milligrams.